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HR and analytics – are you getting the most out of your data?

Published: July 18, 2018

Thanks to the fact that HR duties in most medium or larger companies in Canada are digitally assisted, employers have a lot of information about workers. For optimal use of this data, it’s necessary to step out of the old paradigms and embrace a new, more dynamic skills marketplace where every insight is exploited in a proactive way. It might take a while for the majority to adopt this mindset, but those who manage to integrate data analytics into the work process can gain a huge advantage.

The following areas of business management offer a lot of potential for impactful application of data analytics and deserve utmost attention from top decision-makers. Even if you are already trying to perform those tasks, gaining additional information and perhaps rethinking your data analytics approach could help you derive more value for your company:

Recruitment database can be a gold mine

The best organizations are systematic when it comes to recruitment. It’s very difficult to predict personnel needs accurately, since a few unexpected terminations or a sudden increase in business volume could quickly create additional openings. Because of this, a well-stocked database with contact information of qualified candidates is a very valuable asset. This is especially true in industries where access to top talent is limited or expensive, necessitating long-term relationship building in order to land a coveted expert. The effort needed to create and maintain such a database in minimal, while the edge it provides in high-level head hunting could often prove to be decisive.

Solutions for automated attendance and performance tracking

Large companies sometimes struggle to formulate an accurate picture of their own capacities due to difficulties of accounting for contributions of very diverse teams. However, modern HR tools are sufficiently sophisticated to allow for extensive customization and empower HR departments to track employee performance in a very accurate, yet non-invasive way. It starts with presence in the office, so entrance control and attendance management solutions are an essential part of the package. Data processing is just as important as data collection, with the primary objective to identify recurring patterns and developing trends that could have an impact on output and revenues.

Improved team construction and project management

Historical data about individual performance can assist managers in composing new teams for important projects. Of course, there are factors other than raw performance to consider – for example, do multiple team members have overlapping skills or whether former lead experts could accept a smaller specialist role on a large project. The answers may be hiding in plain sight – you just need to connect the dots and put the right combination together. Objective assessment in real time allows for corrections at a later stage, so it’s not a disaster if some of your experiments return mixed results initially, for as long as you can identify the reasons behind the suboptimal performance.

Long-term strategic planning based on HR data

Long-term vision is a prerequisite for success, particularly in competitive first-world markets. It’s self-evident that projections based on hard data are more likely to be accurate, providing a strong incentive to incorporate data analytics into the upper management layer of the company. In practice, that often means a simplification of data access and retrieval, adoption of visual tools for data presentation, and in rare instances acquiring data mining capacities to deal with large databases. Cultural evolution plays a key role – even the best organized data structure is useless unless the people in charge are willing to actively use the system to guide major strategic decisions.

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